Legal Ethics -
Worlds in Collision

Mary Ann Glendon

Chicago's financial district and the seat of its city government are
only a few blocks apart, yet they belong to two different worlds. I
learned this in my first few months of law practice in 1964 when, as low
person on the totem pole, I had to handle routine motions in both state
and federal courts. There was scarcely any difference in atmosphere
between my firm's sedate quarters in the Continental Bank building and
the austere federal courthouse just around the corner. An aura of
solemnity surrounded the federal judges in their courtrooms, as it did
our senior partners in their spacious but simply furnished offices.
Lawyers exchanged pleasantries and conversed genially in the hallways of
both places.

To walk from lower LaSalle Street to the municipal and county courts on
Washington between Clark and Dearborn, however, was to pass through a
culture warp. From the outside, Chicago's Civic Center on its massive
concrete plaza was no less imposing than the federal building. Inside
was bedlam. The Civic Center was filled with everything that made
Chicago such an exhilarating and alarming city-jostling, shouting,
joking, cajoling, backslapping, backstabbing, bargaining, dealing,
favors granted, grudges paid with interest, intimidation, bribery,
conciliation, grand gestures, obscene remarks, and the occasional
spontaneous act of generosity.

In the courtrooms, protocol was more or less observed, but the strain
was often too much for the regulars. One young litigator from my firm
never forgot his first appearance in municipal court. Full of himself,
he stepped up when his case was called, and began, as we were taught to
do in law school: "May it please the court, my name is Edward R. Lev and
I represent the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company of
Chicago." The judge glared down at the unfortunate newcomer and remarked
(to the delight of seasoned hands): "Well, bully for you!"

Another of my colleagues reported hearing the following exchange in open
court one day while waiting for his own case to be heard:

The separate spheres of Chicago's legal universe generally kept to their
own orbits. Large-firm attorneys had few dealings with small-time
lawyers, and relatively little business in the county or municipal
courts. However, Steven Lubet, who was a Chicago legal services lawyer
in the 1970s, has recorded a rare occasion when the worlds of LaSalle
Street and the Civic Center intersected in a dramatic way.

On the day in question, Lubet was waiting for his case to be called in
one of the most disorderly courtrooms in the city. To his amazement,
when the clerk bawled out the name of the next matter, a well-dressed
lawyer approached the bench and said, "Your Honor, I would like to
present Mr. Albert Jenner." Jenner was one of the city's most respected
lawyers. He had been a member of the Warren Commission and minority
counsel to the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair.
Lubet recalls: "Once Mr. Jenner's presence was announced, the entire
courtroom suddenly metamorphosed. The muttering plaintiffs' bar fell
silent. Clerks began answering inquiries from unrepresented defendants.
The judge actually asked questions about the facts and the law.

. . . Furthermore, this effect lasted for the entire day, long after Mr.
Jenner left."

Jenner's appearance (apparently as a favor to a friend) was like a
visitation from another planet. Long afterwards, Lubet recounts, the
regulars would talk of the time when "Bert Jenner handled a case in our
courtroom."

II

Why do corporate lawyers and lawyers for "people" move past each other
in the legal system like bishops of different colors on a chessboard? To
many, the answer might seem obvious: "It's social class, stupid!" The
most recent work of Jane Jacobs, however, reveals that there is more to
the story. In Systems of Survival (reviewed in First Things,
December 1993), Jacobs maintains that human beings have basically only
two ways of making a living, one concerned with acquiring or protecting
territories, and the other with trading or producing for trade. By a
process resembling natural selection, humankind has developed two basic
approaches to the ethics of making a living, each system perfectly
calibrated to promote success and survival in the way of life it
grounds. Though the two ethical survival strategies are strikingly
different from one another, they are symbiotic-for modern societies need
traders to produce and market goods and services, and we also require
raiders to maintain order and stability. Raiders and traders are almost
inevitably uncomprehending or disdainful of one another, but Jacobs
argues that from a global point of view, each system is valid on its own
terms and each promotes the general welfare.

Today's police officers, soldiers, and politicians (like their hunter-
gatherer forerunners) flourish when certain qualities are in good supply
among them: cunning, prowess, show of force, obedience, respect for
hierarchy, readiness to take vengeance, and, above all, loyalty. The
loyalty that is the bedrock of their relationships not only advances
their common aims but keeps these dangerous people from harming one
another. They are rightly suspicious of trading, for raiders' loyalty to
each other and to their tasks must not be for sale.

Among traders, the central value is honesty, for the very good reason
that commerce cannot be sustained for long without a good deal of trust.
Traders prize such qualities as industriousness, thrift, inventiveness,
tolerance, and ability to compromise. Unlike the clannish raiders,
traders collaborate easily with strangers. They are rightly wary of
force and deception (despite the tempting short-term benefits of such
tactics), for trader prosperity in the long run depends on stable social
conditions and reliable relationships.

Lawyers presented Jacobs with a puzzle, for they are associated with
both raider and trader ethics, often switching from one role to another
depending on the task. A certain tension is built into their official
canons of ethics, e.g., "A lawyer is a representative of clients, an
officer of the legal system, and a public citizen having special
responsibility for the quality of justice." In some legal contexts, an
honesty-based ethic seems to prevail; in others, loyalty seems to be the
highest value.

Jacobs noted with interest, though, that the culture of English
barristers, historically at least, had a strong raider cast. Endowed
with a virtual monopoly on the most raider-like legal activity-the
planning and conduct of courtroom battles-barristers went to great
lengths to shun trading. They did not discuss payment for their
services, and would not sue to collect their fee. On the back of the
barrister's gown there is still a little pocket that once enabled him to
be paid without actually seeing or handling money. Unlike solicitors,
barristers in former times chiefly belonged to social circles where it
was considered disgraceful to be "in trade."

American conditions, however, were different from the beginning. Lawyers
often had to be barristers and solicitors rolled into one. Abraham
Lincoln's legal career, to take one famous example, involved him in the
roles of zealous advocate one day and wise counsellor or peacemaker the
next. Legal education in the United States still purports to be a
foundation for all types of legal work. To Jacobs, it seemed that
lawyers might be carriers of a valuable new survival trait, one that
might be especially useful in complex modern societies where raiders and
traders cannot simply go their symbiotic separate ways. In many
respects, everyone's life is becoming complicated in the way that
lawyers' lives have always been. So if lawyers have really mastered the
art of recognizing the different ethical systems and adapting
appropriately to either one, depending on the task at hand, they ought
to be handy people to have around. In other words, where many people see
lawyers as, to put it politely, ethically challenged, Jacobs thinks they
might be ethically ambidextrous.

Jacobs thus becomes one of the few people since Louis D. Brandeis to
propose that the legal profession might have something to teach other
occupational groups about ethics. Her theory is so endearingly
contrarian that one wants it to be true. But generalist lawyers, for
whom the case is strongest, are in increasingly short supply. Two
momentous changes long ago transformed the legal world that Lincoln
knew: increased specialization, prompted by the rise of corporate firms
at the turn of the century, and a large influx of new lawyers from
relatively unassimilated ethnic groups at about the same time. The
profession began to develop more of a separation between legal raiders
and traders, but not along neat English lines. The split reflected the
growing social stratification of the bar, the increasing division of
labor between litigators and office lawyers, and the development of a
wide range of specialized fields of practice.

Once the dust settled after the robber baron era, trader values were in
clear ascendancy among the establishment lawyers who dominated early
professional organizations and wrote the first codes of ethics. This was
only to be expected, since they and their corporate clients stayed away
from courtroom confrontation as much as possible, and concentrated
mainly on what Jacobs would call trading activities. Many other segments
of the practice were trader strongholds as well: small-town counsellors
and specialized areas like conveyancing, estate planning, and most
aspects of business law.

In a few areas, however, a number of factors combined to push raider
values to the foreground. Litigation was a major specialty of many small
firms and solo practitioners. Some low-status fields-plaintiffs'
personal injury suits, domestic relations cases, and criminal defense
work-revolved around raider fortresses. The clients in such matters, men
and women in acute personal crises, were apt to regard the lawyer (and
he was apt to see himself) as a champion, a special friend in need.
Ethnic lawyers, even when engaged in trader-like activities, tended to
regard themselves, and to be perceived by establishment lawyers, as
outsiders. Whether fighting for their clients, or struggling for their
own economic survival, they often had to operate in strange or hostile
territory. They were at home in a milieu where favors were an important
currency-where clients were friends, and friends were clients.

To elite lawyers, the legal world outside the financial district looked
like a hotbed of sharp practice, hustling, ambulance-chasing, and
generally deplorable ethical standards. Legal ethicists Thomas and Mary
Shaffer, however, have convincingly demonstrated that two quite
different ethical systems were operating side-by-side in the profession:
an "old WASP" or "gentlemen's" ethic among small-town and establishment
lawyers, and an "old world" ethic among lawyers from communities formed
by immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Eastern Europe. The "old
world" ethic stressed loyalty to the client, even at some cost to the
legal system; the "old WASP" ethic emphasized fidelity to legal
institutions and their improvement, even at the cost of sometimes having
to say no to clients.

The Shaffers' old world and old Wasp ethics correspond at many points
with Jacobs' loyalty-based and honesty-based systems. What they add,
however, are the dimensions of ethnicity and religion. The old WASP
ethics were rooted in Protestant rectitude and a well-understood
gentlemen's code. The ethics of old world Jews and Catholics reflected a
worldview that placed clients ahead of institutions, and treated
relationships as more important than rules. From the old world vantage
point, the gentlemen's way often seemed harsh, flinty-hearted, even
inhuman. To establishment lawyers, the immigrants' irreverence toward
the law and its minions looked more like cynicism than a way of keeping
the things of the world in their proper place. Human nature being what
it is, ample support could be found in either camp for the most negative
interpretations. Still, both ethical systems reflected a coherent vision
of the virtuous life. And both contained the needs of corruption.

III

Ask any lawyer who complains about a supposed decline in the ethical
tone of the legal profession to name the beast, and the answer is apt to
be "commercialization." If there is one dogma to which high-minded
lawyers cling more tenaciously than any other, it is that the legal
profession ought to be above the "morals of the marketplace." It should
give one pause, however, that Abraham Lincoln was quite comfortable with
the idea that law is a business as well as a profession, and that his
idea of virtue in a lawyer was not much different from common decency in
any other occupation. The conceit that law is not a business, or only
incidentally so, seems connected with the efforts of elite lawyers in
the early years of this century to distance themselves from the
buccaneer-founders of their own firms and from "hustling" immigrant
lawyers, as well as to assert their independence from their own clients.

Many old school lawyers still chant the refrain. The "most serious
threat to the legal profession" at the present time is "commercialism,"
former Solicitor General and Harvard Dean Erwin Griswold recently wrote.
Albert Jenner, in his final public appearance, told a gathering of
Chicago lawyers: "We need to reorient our thinking away from the legal
marketplace and law firms as profit centers and revenue producers, and
law as a business."

That careless use of "commercial" as an epithet is mischievous. Lawyers'
stubborn refusal to recognize their affinities with other highly
skilled, well-educated sellers of services seems to rest either on the
arrogant assumption that businesspeople have no ethics, or the dubious
proposition that businesspeople invariably place short-term profit
maximization ahead of all other considerations. Those cramped ideas of
business ethics, however, are widely recognized in the business world as
signs of economic and moral pathology. Unfortunately, as lawyers
increasingly accept that law is, among other things, a profit-making
business, many seem to believe that means all ethical bets are off.

If Jane Jacobs is right, the high-minded lawyers who look down on the
morals of the marketplace have got it exactly backward. There was a
joker in the pack of "gentlemen's ethics." The English gentry were
pluperfect raiders who had nothing but contempt for shopkeepers and
merchants. Old school American lawyers seem to have unwittingly imported
the old barristers' disdain for trade into a legal world where most
lawyers, most of the time, regardless of social standing, are engaged in
trading activities. In recent years, again unwittingly, trader-lawyers
have permitted their everyday ethics to be infiltrated and undermined by
raider values that should have been reserved for special occasions.

To see why that is a plausible diagnosis, one must distinguish, as many
ethicists do, between the random individual corruption that flesh is
heir to and structures of sin that create an ethos in which it is
exceptionally difficult for any individual to walk the paths of
righteousness. What Jacobs calls systemic corruption is more serious
than plain old sin, for it poisons the entire moral ecology of a
community. Jacobs' original contribution to the understanding of the
sources of systemic corruption is her theory that one cause is
inadvertent. With a series of arresting examples, she shows how the
introduction of trader values in a raiding system, or vice versa, can
often change things just enough to shatter the old system, to "literally
de-moralize" it. The host system breaks down, losing its ability to
discipline its members. Virtues convert to vices. Honesty and loyalty
take a back seat to greed and force, as traders indulge extreme
proclivities for acquisitiveness, and raider destructiveness runs amok.

Thus, in one of Jacobs' illustrations, it was disastrous for the hunter-
gather Ik tribe of southern Uganda when they were forcibly resettled
from hunting into farming. The Ik had no difficulty learning how to
farm, but they were unable to make the mental adjustments necessary to
sustain a trading way of life. Holding on to their old ways while
adopting the new manner of making a living, they turned their force and
cunning on each other.

Closer to home, we can observe more familiar forms of raider corruption
when our police officers and public officials traffic in what should not
be for sale. Chicago, in the years I practiced there, was governed by
one of the great raiders of all time, Richard J. Daley. Chicagoans still
argue over the personal probity of the late Mayor, but there is no doubt
that the Democratic machine he headed, and the Cook County government-
which was sometimes controlled by Republicans-were theme parks of raider
culture gone bad. A federal investigation in the 1980s confirmed what
every Chicago lawyer already knew or suspected: it was not only clerks,
but certain judges, who were on the take. "Operation Greylord" made
clear that the rot was deep and systemic.

Systemic corruption can wear pin stripes as well as polyester. As her
prime example of what happens when traders take up raiding, Jacobs
points to investment banking in the takeover era. The experience of
large law firms in the same period provides a parallel illustration.
Into the risk-averse worlds of corporate lawyers and bankers in the
1970s came a new generation of raiders, a mogul horde the likes of which
had not been seen since the days when Jay Gould and other grandees of
greed held sway. The corporate raiders' business was at first turned
away by established firms. This was partly out of concern not to offend
existing clients, but also because the raiders' tactics (such as using
lawsuits for pure harassment) were so repugnant. That opened a legal
niche to be quickly filled by younger, more aggressive, firms formed (as
Lincoln Caplan points out in his chronicle of the rise of the Skadden
firm) by Catholics, Jews, and non-Ivy Leaguers who had been snubbed by
old-line firms.

The established firms soon found themselves forced to defend their
clients against hostile takeovers. Eventually, most began to represent
raiders as well. Louis Auchincloss, who retired from a Manhattan firm in
1987 to devote himself to fiction, observed sadly, "There was a time
when you brought a suit only to right a wrong or collect an obligation.
That all the finest firms [now bring takeover suits] is the single most
corrosive factor in the ethics of the bar." Transactional lawyers (who
used to be litigation-shy) joined forces with courtroom lawyers in the
exciting new work. Together they hunted enterprises ripe for capture.
They jointly plotted acquisitions and lawsuits. The workaholic Rambo was
born.

Listen to how Lawrence Lederman, in his Tales from the Takeover
Era, described what drew him from ordinary corporate law to
takeover work: "Besides agility, attempting a takeover requires craft
and the willingness to take risks." "Given a choice I preferred
representing raiders. Besides enjoying the planning, as an outsider I
was attracted to the entrepreneurial clients, interesting men with a
sense of themselves who were trying to make their mark and didn't mind
challenging and dismantling rigid corporate empires." "[L]ittle else in
business galvanized people and brought them together as cohesively as
organizing an attack that would require speed, surprise, and precision
timing." "I found that all the mystery and excitement of sex, of
breaking down resistance, of scoring and conquest, were associated with
a takeover. Manliness was at stake, and measured." "[T]he takeover told
of cunning and daring and the power to take what you wanted."

No sooner had the takeover frenzy begun to subside when the professional
world was rocked by the savings and loan debacle. When, in 1986, federal
agents began their investigation of Lincoln Federal Savings & Loan, the
regulatory audit quickly escalated into a no-holds-barred adversarial
battle. Lincoln's lawyers in the New York firm of Kaye, Scholer,
Fierman, Hays & Handler fought the government's requests for information
every step of the way. Government attorneys struck back in kind, filing
a suit that charged Kaye, Scholer attorneys with lying to regulators,
obstructing the investigation, and remaining passive while Charles
Keating provided false information. The government's hardball tactics
included an administrative order freezing the partnership's assets, a
move that brought Kaye, Scholer quickly to its knees. The firm paid $41
million dollars for a no-fault settlement of the charges.

Shaken by that unprecedented settlement, lawyers began to debate such
questions as whether Kaye,

Scholer attorneys had simply been helping their client in time-honored
fashion to do what it wanted to do within limits of the law. Was a
hostile regulatory audit the equivalent to litigation for ethical
purposes? Did lawyers for publicly regulated clients have a special duty
to the public? What ethical constraints should government attorneys
observe? Should an administrative agency be allowed to freeze a firm's
assets without showing any reason other than to force a settlement?

One question was seldom in the foreground: What had become of the old
counsellors' dictum that "about half the practice of a decent lawyer
consists in telling would-be clients that they are damned fools and
should stop"? The author of a study of Wall Street firms in the 1950s
had concluded that corporate lawyers then possessed enough independence
to permit them to serve not only as advisors, but also as conscience to
big business. The picture that emerged from a similar study published in
1988 was very different. Three out of four large-firm lawyers could not
recollect a single instance in which they had ever even disagreed with a
client. Their motto seemed to be: "The client never wants to be told he
can't do what he wants to do; he wants to be told how to do it, and it
is the lawyer's business to tell him how."

The takeover phenomenon and the savings and loan affair were only the
most notorious in a series of developments that have drawn elite law
firms out of the trader mode and away from "gentlemen's" ethics. The
standard explanations in the legal community emphasize the fierce
competition for business among law firms that began when clients started
to shop around for the best deal, rather than maintaining their
traditional ties with a single firm. Another part of the picture is that
corporate clients themselves were undergoing fundamental changes,
abandoning their traditional reluctance to sue one another. That led to
an increase in the size and prestige of those raider enclaves,
litigation departments, in large law firms. The freakish prosperity of
the eighties permitted all sorts of excess in terms of salaries for
beginners, overstaffing cases, and even interior decoration-as law
firms, like the nobles of San Gimignano, tried to outdo each other in
ostentation.

The binge of the eighties was succeeded by the hangover of the nineties,
but, as Jacobs says, "Water over the dam carries debris." Many law
firms, like many of the corporate clients they served, came under the
control of people with a raider cast of mind. But the result was not the
emergence of a new raider culture with its characteristic, coherent
ethical understandings. The mingling of trader and raider ways, rather,
seemed to draw lawyers into a moral quagmire. Old habits and attitudes
unraveled, as raider ways spread to areas of professional life where
they wrought havoc with relationships that depend on trust. The legal
profession here and there began to resemble the Ik tribesmen, neither
hunting nor farming, but preying on everyone in sight, including one
another. Whence cometh their help?

IV

The field known as "legal ethics" has only a tenuous relation to the
systemic difficulties afflicting the legal profession. For one thing,
formal codes of ethics never aimed at capturing the full network of
understandings that lawyers observe in their dealings with one another,
with clients, and with the courts. They merely set forth a small body of
fairly obvious minimal duties with which lawyers must comply on pain of
discipline or disbarment. Where ethical problems of genuine complexity
are concerned, official codes offer little guidance. They are often
least helpful where most needed.

The American Bar Association's current Model Rules, adopted in 1983,
explicitly recognize that the moral tone of the legal profession depends
primarily on a great web of informal understandings. Within the
framework of a general obligation to represent the client zealously
while remaining within the bounds of the law, a lawyer is free (but not
required) to advise clients to comply with the spirit as well as the
letter of the law. A lawyer is equally at liberty to press the letter to
its limits. If the great web lets go, an individual lawyer is
essentially in free fall.

Recent changes in the rules actually seem to go with the flow of
systemic problems in the profession rather than helping to counter them.
The 1983 Rules, for example, dropped almost all of the language of moral
suasion that had permeated earlier codes of lawyer conduct. Just when
lawyers were coming under exceptional ethical stress, the Model Rules
eliminated such words as "right," "wrong," "good," "bad," "conscience,"
and "character," and replaced them with words like "prudent," "proper,"
"permitted." The latest version of the Rules also eliminated a series of
helpful discussions that used to follow the cryptic canons. The Preamble
to the 1969 Code had emphasized the importance of those "Ethical
Considerations": "[T]hey are aspirational in character and represent the
objectives toward which every member of the profession should strive.
They constitute a body of principles upon which the lawyer can rely for
guidance in many specific situations." The reason the Ethical
Considerations were dropped, apparently, is the growing lack of
consensus within the profession on what is ethical. In other words, the
more moral confusion there is, the less guidance one can expect from
formal codes.

As they stand, the Model Rules are certainly capacious enough to permit
the kind of intelligent flexibility about roles that Jacobs admires and
that generalist lawyers seem once to have possessed. But the current
rules also lend themselves to a simpler "solution" of complex ethical
problems: when in doubt, go with the traditional value of client
loyalty. The most hotly debated issue in connection with the 1983 Rules,
in fact, was whether a lawyer should be required, rather than merely
permitted, to disclose information he has reason to believe necessary to
prevent a client from causing death or serious bodily harm to another
person. The proponents of mandatory disclosure lost out to the advocates
of ironclad client confidentiality.

The apparent advance of the client loyalty ideal at the expense of the
independent counsellor and court-officer roles may mask an even more
serious problem: a de facto priority for the lawyer's own personal or
political concerns. San Francisco attorney Alan Marks recently broke the
taboo on discussing that problem, suggesting in the columns of the
American Bar Association Journal that ethical rules are mere
"showpieces" that leave the most severe ethical dilemmas untouched. The
"real" dilemmas, Marks alleged, arise mostly from "the powerful
compulsion of self-concern."

Is Marks right? Contingent fees do provide many people with access to
justice, but sometimes the fee is so large that the lawyer becomes the
real party in interest. Intelligent use of media opportunities can
advance a client's cause, but many lawyers who seize them appear to be
on personal ego trips. Corporate lawyers have complex loyalties, but
many seem more concerned to satisfy the company managers who hire and
fire lawyers than to protect the interests of scattered shareholder-
owners.

Even more remarkable is the appearance of many lawyers who are
openly operating on their own account. Often the new grandees
portray themselves as rebels against the old notion that law is not a
business. Ironically, lawyers' unapologetic embrace of self-interest may
have been facilitated by the old mindset that equated "commercialism"
and the "morals of the marketplace" with unbridled acquisitiveness. Now
that lawyers are increasingly admitting that they want to run their
"business as a business," many seem to suppose they are exempt from
ordinary decent behavior. Or they imagine that business ethics are
something like the full-bore adversarial tactics of criminal defense
lawyers. They are like the teenage rat in the "Far Side" cartoon, whose
response, when his mother tells him to clean up his room, is: "Criminy!
It's supposed to be a rat hole!"

What got lost along the way was Lincoln's unpretentious, pragmatic
attitude, rooted in the trader understanding that any business,
including law business, thrives best on honesty and cooperation. And the
companion understanding that a raider's deception for the sake of the
task must be carefully limited to certain negotiation and litigation
settings.

Academic debunkers of "professionalism," preoccupied with their
"discovery" that high-minded lawyers have frequently failed to live up
to their professed ideals, have not been helpful in the current period
of turmoil. Friendly reminders of practitioners' shortcomings might once
have served to puncture the balloon of smug professional self-
satisfaction. But the professorial fire brigade has arrived with its
pails of cold water just when the embers of professional pride need to
be coaxed back to life. The scholarly orgy of debunking has obscured the
importance of the facts that such ideals were professed at all, and that
debate about them helped to focus the attention of a large, diverse,
professional community on the question of what kind of life a lawyer
ought to try to live. The old moralistic codes of ethics were often
derided in the academy as self-serving attempts to fend off regulation.

But retelling the old stories and exploring their implications for new
circumstances helped to orient and reinforce each lawyer's quest for a
morally coherent professional life. Today's lawyers wander in an
increasingly impersonal, bureaucratized legal world, where neither
honesty-based nor loyalty-based systems seem to be operating very well.
The families, communities, neighborhoods, and schools that once served
as seedbeds and anchors for personal and professional virtues are
themselves in considerable disarray. The great web of lawyer's informal
understandings hangs in tatters. Today's raw recruits to the knowledge
class seldom have a solid base of old world, old WASP, or any other
culture to fall back on-and no coherent professional culture to embrace.
Emancipated from the old ways, they soldier on, without examples,
guidance, or reinforcement.

The legal ethos that is emerging is bound to be very different from a
world in which most lawyers, most of the time, were at least oriented
toward visions of lawyering that demanded a considerable degree of self-
subordination-whether of the raider or trader variety. Just as sexual
self-expression has few limits in a culture where chaste behavior is
mocked, lawyers' self-interest is apt to run amok when anyone who places
client or court above profit is branded a hypocrite or a chump. A lawyer
who takes his duties to the court and the legal system seriously may
well be at a disadvantage against a less scrupulous adversary. In such
circumstances, should we be astonished that short-term self-interest
often prevails?

The collision and disintegration of old raider and trader understandings
have had personal as well as professional consequences. Transported from
their communities of memory to membership in America's deracinated
technocrat class, liberated from the networks of old world and old WASP
values, many lawyers are now free, self-determining, and miserable. Like
the displaced Machiguengas in Mario Vargas Llosa's The
Storyteller, they've lost their myths about where they came from,
who they are, and where they are going. They can no longer make sense of
their lives. The stories they heard in law school about independence,
public service, and professionalism don't match up with their everyday
experiences. Rather than being ethically adaptable in Jacobs' flattering
sense, many are merely ethically agile. The patron saint of these lone
raiders is not honest, adaptable Abe Lincoln. Nor is it loyal, single-
minded Perry Mason. It is the chameleon-like Talleyrand, the all-time
champion of reinventing one's self.

Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard
University and member of the Advisory Board of First Things. Her
forthcoming book, A Nation Under Lawyers, will be published in
1994 by Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. Copyright 1994 by Mary Ann Glendon.